Company:

With a population of approximately 75,000
people, comprising an area of 5,229 square
kilometres, Hastings is one of the two major
urban areas in Hawke’s Bay, on the east
coast of the North Island of New Zealand.
Hastings District Council has 550 employees
located across one main administration
campus and 16 remote sites, facilitating key
local government services along with the
strategic management and maintenance
of its municipality and community.

Challenge:

Hastings District Council’s previous
storage and backup solution could
no longer scale to meet growth capacities.
In addition to being past its support
lifecycle, it also required significant
manual intervention to maintain the
Council’s day-to-day operations. This
resulted in high operational costs and
distraction from more important tasks.
Multiple products were required to cope
with the many stages between image
creation, and the eventual shipping
of offsite backup tapes. A formal archival
component for data, email and retired
systems was also lacking. Specialised
backup requirements and strategy were
employed to backup SQL databases.

Results:

Greater reliability throughout the
business with improved backup
process; 88% reduction in time

About
DATACOM:

With 50 years’ experience in technology,
Datacom has grown to be one of Asia
Pacific’s leading locally-owned IT-based
service providers. Datacom operates
across New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia
and the Philippines. Datacom prides itself
on being vendor independent and making
decisions in its customers’ best interests.
Its open approach focuses clearly on what
customers’ business needs.

The Business Challenge

In Hastings District Council, the IT infrastructure is the foundation that all other business
units rely on to perform daily operations. Like many government organisations, it is facing
the challenge of a legacy system that is unable to meet growth capacities. Hastings District
Council’s data protection architecture was originally an afterthought. A mixture of a paid
solution and various free software systems was used to backup and restore important council
and resident information.

“Maintaining the systems was terrible,” Hastings District Council Infrastructure Support Officer,
Joshua King said. “It wasn’t reliable and consumed quite a lot of my time to babysit it, checking
and fixing up the backups.”

With a population of nearly 75,000 citizens and over 550 staff members, King explains a large portion
of the data held on file at Council was resident’s information such as house plans and dog registrations.

“It is our responsibility to do a good job for residents and the thought of losing data was not
a good feeling.”

Additionally, the legacy solution in place was past its support lifecycle, and storage and
backups could no longer scale to meet forecasted growth.

There was significant manual intervention to maintain day-to-day operations, resulting in high
operational costs and distraction from more important tasks.

“The two main drivers were the reliability of our backup solution in its entirety,” King said. “And
the ability to scale as our storage increases. Based on historical data, we forecast a 15 percent
disk space usage increase every year, but as business units create more and more media rich
data, this is likely to be higher in reality.”

Multiple software systems were required to cope with the stages between image creation, and
specialised backup requirements were in place to backup the SQL databases.

Taking advantage of a reorganisation within Council, including new management, King raised
the issue of implementing a unified solution. “We fought hard for it. The decision was based
on how important it was and the time it was taking for staff to maintain.”

Council issued a RFP for the project and assessed responses from 13 vendors. Following
a weighted evaluation, Hastings District Council went with Datacom, a partner they have
worked with for over a decade.

“It was a no brainer from a reseller point of view to go with Veeam,” says Hayden Friend, HPE
Solutions Architect - Procurement Services Group, a Platinum partner of Veeam and HPE.

The Veeam Solution

Since the rollout of the Veeam Availability Suite™ Enterprise Plus edition in December 2016,
King has spent a lot less time worrying about the backup and storage process at Hastings
District Council.

Specifically, he no longer spends one-sixth of his time monitoring the process. The workload
on the production environment has been all but eliminated. Backups of 28.5 TB of data have
reduced from more than 16 hours to less than two hours, an 88% reduction of time.

The number of backup management tools has also reduced from four to just one; reducing
complexity, risk and staff training requirements.

Hastings District Council replicates a subset of its important servers to a Veeam Cloud Connect
service provider (TIMG), and after deduplication and compression Council is currently using
12 TB of their 20 TB capacity.

“We still check the Veeam console daily as part of our routine, but everything is always successful.
We’ve set up jobs and they just happen. When we need to do a restoration, it just works. I can
confidently tell our users that if a file was once where they said it was that we will get it back for them.

“It’s one product that handles everything from the initial backup, to replication to shipping the
backups off-site. This is a huge difference from the four cobbled-together products we were
previously using.”

King said Veeam is also fast. The previous solution’s backups would bleed into the next
business day. “Now all our backup jobs finish in under 2.5 hours, but if they all ran at once it’d
be done in just over an hour.”

The Results

Greater reliability throughout the business with improved backup process;
88% reduction in time
Hasting District Council is providing more and more online services to its residents. It is
critical that its systems are up and working when residents need them. “We are very much a
24/7 operation now,” King said. “While some business units within Council would be able to
operate at a reduced capacity should the network fall over, most business units would have
to shut down until Council was back online, resulting in lost revenue and angry residents.”

Set up IT infrastructure for future growth and scalability
One of the main pain points for King was the manual intervention required during the
backup process in the legacy solution. It consumed a lot of his day-to-day work time,
meaning he was not available for other tasks and projects were put on hold due to lack
of human resources. It could not scale in relation the growth of its object systems and data.
Within Hastings District Council, the Information Management and Business Transformation
(IMBT) team is viewed as the “blood that flows through Council”. “We’re the foundation that
all other business units rely on to perform their operations.” Having robust IT infrastructure
that can grow with its operations was essential.

Delivers continual 24.7.365 availability of data with Veeam Cloud Connect
Being able to restore from Veeam’s Backup from Storage Snapshots means Hastings District
Council can have a very low RPO, with lightning fast recovery times from their repositories.
Supplementing this, Council replicates a subset of its most important servers to a Veeam
Cloud Connect service provider, totalling about 12 TB of cloud storage.